This absorbing documentary pays tribute to the sociologist and pioneer of cultural studies Stuart Hall, who founded the New Left Review and coined the term ‘Thatcherism’. Against a fabulous Miles Davis soundtrack (a different track frames each section), the film charts both his life-story and changes within British society from his arrival in post-war Britain in 1951, as a brilliant young Jamaican academic on a Rhodes scholarship, part of the ‘Windrush generation’ of immigrants.

The film is being shown as part of Black History Month 2014, a highly appropriate choice given Stuart Hall’s status as one of the world’s premier Black public intellectuals (Harvard Professor Henry Gates called him “Black Britain’s leading theorist of black Britain”) and a timely one – he died earlier this year aged 82 when he was hailed in obituaries as “an intellectual giant and an inspirational figure” (Independent) and a “spellbinding orator and a teacher of enormous influence” (Guardian).

Director/screenwriter, the artist John Akomfrah, had worked on a three-screen gallery piece about Hall, “Unfinished Conversation”, after which it struck him that there was a lot of unused material which he then decided to develop into a feature length documentary: “The idea was to see whether a single figure could sum up the post-migrant experience. Hall was last of the great titans, who fundamentally altered how we look at ourselves and how we lived. ”

“The film plays like a personal tour of England in the last half century and the forces that shaped it ….a fascinating film that manages to distill the currents of history and make them come alive in a very personal way.” James Greenberg, Hollywood Reporter

“An absorbing account” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian